Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che’s “delegation” on his trip was both tiny and eclectic. With him were his adolescent bodyguard, Lieutenant José Argudín; his PSP aide, “Pancho” García Vals; the sugar economist Alfredo Menéndez; and a Rebel Army captain, Omar Fernández. Fifty-year-old Dr. Salvador Vilaseca, a mathematics professor from Havana University who was now on the executive board of Cuba’s National Agricultural Development Bank (Banfaic), was the oldest member of the group. Their main destinations were Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ceylon—the key Bandung Pact states with which Cuba wanted to establish diplomatic relations and, most important, trade ties. Japan, an important sugar importer and a heavily industrialized country, was also a
high priority on the itinerary, as was Yugoslavia. The agricultural reform bill would be issued soon, and both Fidel and Che knew it was going to cause a heavy fallout with Cuba’s landowners and the Americans; alternative markets had to be found for Cuba’s sugar.
A few weeks into the trip, at Fidel’s insistence, José Pardo Llada, a right-wing political pundit and radio commentator, joined the group. Fidel’s decision to add Pardo Llada to Che’s traveling caravan was curious. He had met Che only once before, in January, when he went to La Cabaña to inquire about the fate of Ernesto De la Fé, Batista’s former information minister and a personal friend. Che had told Pardo Llada flatly that there was nothing he could do for him; the case of De la Fé was in the hands of the revolutionary tribunals, and there was plenty of evidence against him. According to Pardo Llada, Che told him, “To be frank, if it were up to me, I’d have him shot tomorrrow.” De la Fé’s case had dragged on and become something of an issue in the Cuban media. Che had been questioned about it during his TV appearance on April 28, and had used the occasion to damn De la Fé further, pointing out that when arrested the former minister had in his possession copies of files compiled by BRAC, the notorious anticommunist police bureau created by the CIA. Orlando Borrego said that Che’s inability to “conclude” the De la Fé case was one of the things that had most frustrated him when Fidel ordered an end to the revolutionary tribunals.
Pardo Llada himself told Fidel he saw little reason why he should go off on a trade mission. He was a journalist and he knew nothing about commerce. “Che doesn’t know anything about it, either,” Fidel replied. “It’s all a matter of common sense. What do you think I know about governing?” Pardo Llada’s inclusion in Che’s entourage fit the pattern set by Fidel on his trip to the United States, when he had surrounded himself with a “bourgeois right wing.” It could do no harm to have an influential anticommunist along with Che to convey the impression that the mission was tame.
Fidel had another motive as well. Pardo Llado was bright, well respected both as a journalist and as a former opposition politician, and his daily radio program commanded a huge audience in Cuba; in other words, in the inevitable break that was coming, Pardo Llada was going to be a problem, and it behooved Fidel to find a place where he would not be a threat. Pardo Llada suspected that both he and Che were being put out to pasture, and he said as much to Che, who did little to disabuse him of the notion. But it was Pardo, not Che, whom Fidel hoped to tempt into exile. He joined the group in New Delhi, and on his second day there, Che sounded out the idea—proposed, he said, by Fidel—of Pardo’s staying on in India as ambassador. Pardo flatly refused to even consider the offer, and Che dropped the subject.
Pardo Llada traveled grudgingly with Che’s mission for several weeks, through the visits to Indonesia and Japan, and as far as he could see, there were no benefits being gained. No Cuban sugar had been sold, nothing had been purchased. In early August, as the delegation turned westward, heading for Ceylon and on to Yugoslavia, Pardo Llada decided he’d had enough and told Che he was going home. “Might it not be that you don’t want to compromise yourself by visiting a Communist country like Yugoslavia?” Che asked. Pardo denied the suggestion and repeated his suspicion that Fidel had sent them both on a kind of exiles’ walking tour. Che was an army officer and had no choice but to follow orders;
he
was a private citizen and free to make his own decisions, and his decision was to quit.
Pardo Llada left the group in Singapore, agreeing to hand-deliver letters Che had written to Aleida and Fidel. He dropped Aleida’s letter off at the Guevara’s home in the countryside outside Havana, then went to Fidel’s office in the new INRA building. Fidel asked a few questions about the trip and Che’s health, then opened Che’s two-page letter and read it slowly. When he had finished, he wordlessly handed Pardo one of the pages, pointing with his finger to a paragraph. Pardo Llada read it, and then reread it in order to memorize Che’s words.
Fidel,
. . . I’m taking advantage of the quick and unexpected return of your friend Pardito to send you this. Speaking of Pardo, as you’ll see he didn’t want to accept the Embassy [post] in India. And now it seems he isn’t eager to follow us to Yugoslavia. He must have his motives. I have argued a lot during these two months with him, and I can assure you that Pardito isn’t one of us. ...
Pardo thought that Fidel showed a “perverse satisfaction” in letting him read the passage. When he handed back the letter, Fidel’s only comment was, “So. It seems like Che isn’t very fond of you.”
Pardo Llada would meet Che several more times, and he would have to intervene for another friend in trouble with the revolution. But that problem—and Pardo Llada’s own crisis—lay ahead, and for now he resumed his activities as a radio commentator, increasingly worried about Cuba’s political direction. Che’s “commercial mission,” meanwhile, continued its apparently fruitless perambulations across Asia and North Africa to Europe.
Despite its apparent aimlessness, Che’s trip had an important subtext. Fidel wanted to sell sugar to the Soviets as a prelude to establishing trade relations with Moscow and the Communist bloc. In and of itself, such a trade deal shouldn’t have raised eyebrows. The U.S.S.R. had been a traditional, if minor, purchaser of Cuban sugar, averaging 500,000 tons annually even after Batista had severed relations with the Soviets in 1952. But, according to Alfredo Menéndez, the PSP sugar expert who traveled with Che, the last sugar sale to Moscow, in 1956, had been permitted only after Washington gave the go-ahead. If that was true, it underscored the cruel reality of Cuba’s role as a virtual economic vassal state to the North Americans. Since the United States was the world’s largest sugar consumer, it had enormous leverage over not just the Cuban economy but its politics and foreign policy as well. Given U.S. suspicions about the political direction of the Cuban revolution, it was important to keep any negotiations with the Soviets as discreet as possible.
Menéndez was to be the point man in negotiations that he hoped would fulfill what he called “an old aspiration of the Popular Socialist Party,” to break free of Cuba’s dependency on the United States once and for all. “In 1959,” he said, “Cuba had the capacity to produce 7 million tons of sugar. The U.S. bought a little under 3 million tons, although it had the capacity to buy more. ... And so we wanted to change the market. The first objective, that of selling sugar to the Soviet Union, was with a view to expanding our markets. Not only with the Soviet Union, but with the rest of the socialist countries. It was a strategy.”
To pursue that strategy, Fidel first cleverly covered his bases. On June 13, the day after Che’s mission left Havana, Fidel called on the United States to increase the quota for imports of Cuban sugar from 3 million to 8 million tons. The offer to buy
all
of Cuba’s sugar was immediately turned down, as Fidel no doubt anticipated, but it put the rest of the world on notice that Cuba was looking for customers. (And indeed, a year later, when Nikita Khrushchev agreed to buy almost all of Cuba’s sugar at above world prices, Fidel could maintain he had offered it first to the Yankees.)
Che’s initial contacts with the Soviets were made in Cairo, before Pardo Llada joined the group. Che was in charge of making the approach to sell the sugar, while Menéndez handled the details. Those details were hammered out in secret over the next month of travel, with Menéndez making two trips back to Havana to consult with Fidel. By late July, the Soviets had agreed to buy 500,000 tons of Cuban sugar, to be negotiated at a neutral site—London, where the Soviets had a big trade mission and the deal could be done under the auspices of an international sugar brokerage firm. By doing
it in London, Menéndez explained, “it could go through without being noticed and we didn’t give it any political connotation.”
While the sugar sale itself later became public, the complex prior negotiations between Che and the Soviets never appeared in the official chronology of Che’s 1959 “goodwill mission.” The reason for the omission is fairly obvious. The sugar negotiations were an important first step in the secret talks leading up to Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union and are very much at odds with official Cuban history, which maintains that the Castro regime was pushed into the Soviet camp because of the United States’ hostility and aggression.
The visa of Alexandr Alexiev, the KGB man who had been cooling his heels in Moscow since January, was now suddenly approved. “The Cubans put ‘TASS correspondent’ in my passport,” Alexiev said. “They told me they had done it because they were still afraid to invite an official of the Soviet Union.” Alexiev left for Cuba in September, taking a circuitous route via Italy and Venezuela, and finally arriving in Havana on October 1. The tempo of the delicate dance between the Cubans and Soviets would now pick up.
Che had returned to Cuba only three weeks earlier. His trip had lasted almost three months and taken him to fourteen countries. He had met and conversed with heads of state—Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Tito in Yugoslavia, and Jawaharlal Nehru in India. He had been cheered by crowds in Gaza and Pakistan, toured factories and cooperative farms, and witnessed for himself the conditions of life in a part of the world where the old colonial empires were disintegrating. His mission, he told the press, had been a success, for he had seen for himself that the Cuban revolution was respected and admired by people around the world. Diplomatic and trade relations had been established with a number of countries, and he was confident that Cubans would soon see their benefits.
Che followed up his public statements with a series of short, informative articles published in
Verde Olivo
. Occasional traces of irony and lyricism filter through, but for the most part Che’s travel accounts are dry. His companions, however, had florid tales to tell of their iconoclastic
jefe
, most of them featuring his disrespect for protocol. Some of the memorable vignettes were later written up by Pardo Llada.
In New Delhi, Che’s meeting with his old hero Nehru took place over a sumptuous luncheon at the government palace. As Pardo retold it, Che was on his best behavior, wearing a gabardine dress uniform for the occasion
instead of his usual olive green fatigues. He quipped irreverently to his companions as he entered the palace, “I think I’m pretty elegant—enough, anyway, to dine with the gentleman Prime Minister of the most underdeveloped country on Earth.”
Nehru, his daughter Indira, and her young sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, were all in attendance. Che smiled politely while the venerable Indian prime minister described each exotic dish being served. The banquet went on in this banal fashion for more than two hours, and finally Che could stand it no longer. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “what is your opinion of Communist China?” Nehru looked at him absently and replied, “Mr. Comandante, have you tasted one of these delicious apples?” “Mr. Prime Minister: Have you read Mao Tse-tung?” “Ah, Mr. Comandante, how pleased I am that you have liked the apples.”
Che later wrote that Nehru displayed “the amiable familiarity of a patriarchal grandfather” and “a noble interest in the struggles and vicissitudes of the Cuban people,” but, in fact, Che felt that there was little to be learned from the founding fathers of modern India. The Nehru government was unwilling to embark on a radical agrarian reform program or to break the powers of the religious and feudal institutions that Che felt kept India’s people mired in poverty.
In Djakarta, Che fell in with a congenial compatriot, the Argentine ambassador, who regaled him with stories about Sukarno’s sybaritic lifestyle: how he lived like a monarch and maintained a harem of women of different nationalities. His current favorite, Che was told, was a Russian woman, a “gift” from Nikita Khrushchev. When Che went to Sukarno’s palace for a meeting, the Argentine envoy went along as his interpreter. Sukarno insisted on showing off his private collection of paintings, and the tour went on and on. Pardo could tell that Che was getting restless. Finally, Che broke his silence: “Well, Mr. Sukarno, in this entire tour we still haven’t seen the little Russian girl, who they say is the best thing in your collection.” Fortunately, Sukarno didn’t understand Spanish. The Argentine ambassador nearly fainted with shock and disbelief, but recovered in time to invent a question about the Indonesian economy.
Alfredo Menéndez recalled Che’s reaction when he was told by the Cuban ambassador in Tokyo that he was expected to go the next day to lay a wreath at Japan’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, commemorating the men lost in World War II. Che reacted violently. “No way I’ll go! That was an imperialist army that killed millions of Asians. ... Where
I will go
is to Hiroshima, where the Americans killed 100,000 Japanese.” The diplomat spluttered and told him it was impossible, that it had already been arranged with the Japanese chancellor. Che was adamant. “It’s your problem, not
mine,” he said. “You made the arrangements without my authorization, and now you can go and undo it!”
Japan was one of the most important stops. Che spent much of his time there touring the factories of electronics companies such as Mitsubishi and Toshiba. The Japanese bought a million tons of sugar on the world market, a third of it from Cuba, and Che hoped to raise the Cuban share. His idea was to propose that the Japanese could pay for anything over their present quota in yen; the money would remain in Japan and be spent by Cuba on Japanese products. Che asked for a meeting to be arranged with the Japanese foreign trade minister. “Che made the proposal,” Menéndez recalled, “but the man said he couldn’t agree to it, that their economy was open; they would continue to buy sugar, but without any obligations. ‘You’re under pressure from the fair-haired Northerners, aren’t you?’ Che said. And the Japanese said: ‘It’s true,’ at which Che told him there was no problem. He understood.”